Main dominée par le coeur (1946)

Toréador (1918–33)

Main dominée par le coeur (1946)

Rosemonde (1954)

Paul et Virginie (1920-46)

Dernier poème (1956)

Poulenc’s first song with piano was written at the request of Jean Cocteau, who had been entrusted with the artistic direction of the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier for a couple of weeks in late 1918. His idea was to stage a music-hall tribute featuring, according to Poulenc, “real acrobats, jugglers, wrestlers and boxers” with music by Satie, Auric, Durey and Poulenc himself. Although it seems unlikely that the guest director ever succeeded in assembling such disparate elements at the Vieux-Colombier, Poulenc did provide him with an instrumental piece called Jongleurs (now lost) and a “chanson hispano-italienne” to words sent to him by the writer in September 1918. More Spanish than Italian, in accordance with Cocteau’s instructions, Poulenc’s youthful setting regularly settles on a deliberately clichéd cadence on “Toréador” and includes a cheerful jota-in-a-gondola refrain. This “fake café-concert song,” as Poulenc described it, remained unpublished until – on the advice of his painter friend Jacques-Emile Blanche, who had probably heard the composer sing it – he revised it in 1933.

Although Poulenc was to set other texts by Cocteau, including the anything-but-frivolous La Voix humaine, he had a more fruitful relationship with the poems of Paul Eluard, above all in the four cycles culminating in La travail du peintre in 1956. Main dominée par le coeur, written as a birthday present for for his friend Marie-Blanche de Polignac, is a comparatively slight inspiration, lasting little more than a minute but so beautifully written that its many modulation give an impression of complete spontaneity. In fact, it took him three days to complete – which, he said, “might be a lot for so little, but that’s very quick for me: I’m no Schubert, alas.” No Schubert perhaps but, for once in Poulenc’s songs, there is a suggestion that there was at least a little Fauré in him.

Poulenc’s other favourite poet was Guillaume Apollinaire, nearly 30 of whose poems he set to music between 1919 and 1960. Rosemonde, based on a text from Alcools, seems to have been written as a tribute to Amsterdam, where he and Pierre Bernac gave annual song recitals for over 20 years and where it was first performed in 1954. Its gentle nostalgia no doubt reflects the composer’s affection for the canals of Amsterdam as much as the poet’s affection for the two hours dedicated to Rosemonde.

Paul et Virginie is Poulenc’s one setting of a poem by Raymond Radiguet, who died at the age of 20 in 1923. “These few lines,” Poulenc said, “have always had a magic savour for me.” He first tried to set them in 1920 but couldn’t cope with a song with no opportunity for modulation until, on a rainy day 26 years later, he found a way of doing it “with little music, much tenderness and a silence” – a silence now followed by a modulation of which he was justly proud. The poem alludes, of course, to Bernadin de Saint-Pierre’s novel of the same title.

There are two, equally sad, Poulenc songs to words by Robert Desnos, the surrealist poet who was arrested for his work in the Paris Resistance and sent eventually to Terezin, where he died of typhus shortly after the liberation of the camp in 1945. Dernier poème is actually a shorter version of a poem published in 1930 – which fact, bearing in mind that it was scribbled on a scrap of paper at Terezin and addressed to his wife, scarcely reduces its emotional impact. Poulenc’s setting, which is dedicated to the poet’s widow, has no place for the waltz-time rhythms of his earlier Desnos song, Le Disparu. It moves at the steady, gravely thoughtful walking pace suggested by the opening lines, the piano preserving its expressive discretion until the exclamation of the closing bars.